If the GP's "multiline editing" means what is also called "block selection" (e.g. using Alt + arrow keys in Notepad++), then multiline editing won't work -- logically, just simply cannot work -- unless the text is aligned. Which is one reason why I think that was what was meant.

The other reason is, this is pretty much the only reasonable interpretation of "multiline editing" I can see here. Which makes me intensely curious: What did you mean by, or think was meant by, "multiline editing"?

There's more than block selection which is actually quite limiting in comparison with the other possibilities. What I do often (SublimeText, VSCode for instance) is select a token, select a bunch of occurrences of that over multiple lines, then start editing from there. So in the case of e.g. unaligned equal signs select the first one, Ctrl-D to select the equals sign on the next lines, then move cursor around word by word and edit. Or indeed start by creating multiple cursors at the front of a line and start from there. Etc.